EBSCO Information Services, headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., the third largest private company in Birmingham, Alabama, with annual sales of nearly $2 billion according to the BBJ's 2013 Book of Lists.[1] EBSCO offers library resources to customers in academic, medical, K–12, public library, law, corporate, and government markets. Its products include EBSCONET, a complete e-resource management system, and EBSCOhost, which supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus ebooks, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. In 2010, EBSCO introduced its EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to institutions, which allows searches of a portfolio of journals and magazines.[2]

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EBSCO Information Services is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., a family owned company since 1944. "EBSCO" is an acronym for Elton B. Stephens Co. According to Forbes Magazine, EBSCO is one of the largest privately held companies in Alabama and one of the top 200 in the United States, based on revenues and employee numbers.[3] Sales surpassed $1 billion in 1997 and exceeded $2 billion in 2006.

EBSCO Industries is a diverse company which includes over 40 businesses. EBSCO Publishing was established in 1984 as a print publication called Popular Magazine Review, featuring article abstracts from more than 300 magazines. In 1987 the company was purchased by EBSCO Industries and its name was changed to EBSCO Publishing. It employed around 750 people by 2007.[4] In 2003 it acquired Whitston Publishing, another database provider.[5] In 2010 EBSCO purchased NetLibrary and in 2011, EBSCO Publishing took over H. W. Wilson Company.[6][7][8] It merged with EBSCO Information Services on July 1, 2013. The merged business operates as EBSCO Information Services.[9] In 2015 EBSCO acquired YBP (Yankee Book Peddler) Library Services from Baker & Taylor, and later renamed it GOBI Library Solutions.[10][11] As of 2017[update], the President is Tim Collins.[12]

Discovery: This product is used to create a unified, customized index of an institution's information resources, and a means of accessing all the content from a single search box. The system works by harvesting metadata from both internal and external sources, and then creating a preindexed service.

eBooks: EBSCO provides ebooks and audiobooks across a wide range of subject matter. EBSCO reports that their database includes over a million ebooks and 90,000 audiobooks from over 1500 publishers.[14]

DynaMed Plus is a clinical reference tool for physicians and other health care professionals for use at the point-of-care. DynaMed Plus ranked highest among 10 online clinical resources in a study in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology[15] and also had the highest overall performance in the disease reference product category in two successive reports on clinical decision support resources by KLAS, a research firm that specializes in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors.[16]

EBSCO has two large solar electric arrays, is converting its corporate fleet of cars to hybrids, has established a "Green Team" at its headquarters, and has released GreenFILE, a free database designed to help people research the impact humans have on the environment. EBSCO was awarded a 2008 Environmental Merit Award Award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency's New England Office and was honored by the Special Library Association as "Green Champions" as part of the association's "Knowledge to Go Green" initiative on Earth Day 2009.[17]

EBSCO philanthropic initiatives include efforts to bridge the digital divide (between the industrialized world and developing nations) and work with the Open Society Foundations to provide essential research databases for universities in 39 developing countries.[18] In 2012, the Stephens were recognized for their philanthropic work.[19]

In 2017, an anti-pornography organization, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as "Morality in Media") criticized EBSCO because its databases, widely used in schools in the United States, "could be used to search for information about sexual terms."[20] The group said that some articles from Men's Health and other publications indexed by EBSCO included articles with sexual (but not pornographic) content and asserted that other articles in the database linked to websites that included pornography.[20] EBSCO responded by saying that it took the complaint seriously, but was unaware of any case "of students using its databases to access pornography or other explicit materials" and that "the searches NCOSE was concerned about had been conducted by adults actively searching for graphic materials, often on home computers that don't have the kinds of controls and filters common on school computers."[20]

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